The Best of British Cinema: ‘Blitz’ (2024)
Director Steve McQueen’s poignant war drama is a Dickensian masterpiece
In all honesty, as much as I love the work of Steve McQueen and have since first discovering it (you can read all about this, and McQueen’s career to an extent, in my Best of British piece on his debut feature Hunger), I had my reservations about Blitz. With a rather cheesy tagline like ‘A boy’s journey. A mother’s love. Miles of burning city between them.’ and a plot revolving around World War II Britain, McQueen’s step back into history worried me a little — it felt too easy for a director of his calibre, too simple and frankly too patriotic given McQueen’s previous films about British history. Hunger certainly doesn’t paint Britain in a positive light, and his brilliant Small Axe anthology only added to that bleak view of Britain — a deeply racist place ran by corrupted and dishonest institutions where hope and solace are near impossible to find, whether at parties (as in Lover’s Rock), education for children (in Education) or simply in day to day life.
Perhaps I was being a little too ready to jump to conclusions based on my own image of war films — they always, in my mind, have sweeping scores as you get a dramatic montage of soldiers exploding before cutting to Winston Churchill having a good think and then you have some…
